Bad Girls Good Women (86 page)

‘I’ve never had a real house,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t it make you feel safe, owning electric blankets and pictures of water meadows?’

‘You are safe,’ Mitch answered. ‘I told you.’

‘I love you. I don’t want anything except you, but I quite love my house, as well. Look, Mitch, do you think this little chair looks nice here?’

Mitch would put his head on one side, seeming to look at the chair but really looking at Mattie’s glowing face. Then he would nod.

‘I think it does. Yep, it’s good there.’ He put his arms round her waist, and she let her head fall back against him.

They were happy. At first, Mattie had almost been afraid to move in case the happiness broke, or disappeared as quickly as it had come. The very ordinariness, that other people took for granted, seemed a miracle. Then, with Mitch’s certainty to reassure her, she began to accept it. Mattie found that she loved routine, and at Coppins they slipped comfortably into patterns that, even half a year ago, she would have dismissed as impossible.

In the mornings, Mitch worked. He liked to have time to attend to his investments, to make telephone calls and to read the financial press. While he was busy Mattie shopped, or read scripts. She turned them all down but she did have lunch with her agent, although she had to rush away afterwards to a sale at Phillips. In the afternoons sometimes Mitch played golf, or they went for mild walks, or else pottered companionably in the big garden. It made Mattie laugh to find herself wondering which were weeds and which were plants growing in the cracks of the crazy-paved terrace. In the evenings they ate quietly at home together. Occasionally they went to the local cinema, even less frequently they went to the theatre in the West End. They saw almost no one, because they didn’t need any company beyond their own. The peace and contentment, to Mattie, seemed almost magical.

One of the few people they did see was Felix. He came down at Mattie’s invitation to give some advice about the house. She showed him around it from top to bottom, and Felix listened politely to her plans. But when they came back to their armchairs in the drawing room she saw his face, and started to laugh.

‘Poor Felix. You hate it, don’t you?’

‘Of course I don’t hate it. It’s a fine house.’

‘But not your kind of house.’

‘You’ve … made it all very much of a piece. The style suits the house. You don’t need me to help.’

Mattie was still laughing. ‘I suppose not. I’ve found out that I like big, fat armchairs and lampshades with fringes and pictures that you can look at and see straight away what they’re supposed to be pictures of. I suppose I’ve had a kind of image of what a proper house should be, ever since I was a little girl. The opposite of my mum and dad’s house. I shouldn’t need your approval of that, should I? Felix, I must have wanted it because I like you so much.’

Felix crossed to Mattie’s chair, then knelt down in front of her so that their faces were level. ‘I do approve. Of the house, and everything. I’ve never seen you look so pretty. Being happy suits you.’

She smiled at him. ‘Doesn’t it? Come on, put your notebook away. Let’s go and find Mitch, and have a drink.’

Felix had noticed that when they had been apart for more than a few minutes, Mattie began to look anxiously around for Mitch. He also noticed that she poured herself a drink, and then forgot about it. It was good, he thought. All of it, even Coppins itself.

Almost the only other visitor was Julia. She came to lunch, one Sunday in early September, driving up to the house in her red car. Mattie was in the garden. There was a half-moon-shaped rosebed beyond the terrace, and Mattie was snipping the dead heads off the Blue Moon and the Wendy Cussons with a pair of secateurs. Her face and arms were faintly freckled with the sun and her hair was tied up in a damp, heavy knot at the nape of her neck. She saw that the car was Julia’s, and came running to meet her. They hugged each other, and over Mattie’s shoulder Julia saw Mitch come out of the house. He was wearing a golf pullover and checked trousers, and he lifted his arm to wave to her.

Mattie and Julia had met, when they could, after Mattie’s marriage. But there was a constraint between them. They had never talked about Alexander, and it seemed unlikely now that they ever would. The omission left treacherous openings at the end of every avenue of talk.

Today Julia knew that it was Mattie who seized her hand and led her in a tour of the house, and then presided proudly over drinks and lunch, but it was a different Mattie, almost a stranger. They talked, and Mitch joined in, but the old understanding between the two of them that had never needed any words seemed to have gone for good. It was as if Mattie had grown slightly deaf, and Julia wondered if she had lost her own hearing too. It was hard not to feel that her oldest friend had gone away somewhere, and that Mitch Howorth had taken her.

There was just one flash of the old Mattie. The meal was very good, a chicken dish with lemon followed by apple charlotte.

‘Did you make this, Mat?’ Julia asked.

Mattie shrugged airily. ‘It’s very simple.’ Her face stayed perfectly straight for a second, then melted. ‘Nah, of course not. Mrs Hopper does it. I knew you wouldn’t believe me even if I tried to pretend.’

‘I might well have done,’ Julia said faintly. ‘Thank God you didn’t.’

After they had eaten, Mitch announced that he was going upstairs to read the papers for an hour.

‘Go on then, my love.’ Mattie reached up to touch his hand as he passed. She winked at Julia. ‘Have a sleep, he means.’ Julia had the impression she was longing to go with him. They went outside, and lay in the sun on canvas loungers. There was a sheen on Mattie’s skin, and her figure looked full and ripe. She sighed and let her head fall back, giving herself up to the sun. Julia knew the resonance and sweetness of physical satisfaction. She was glad for Mattie, but her contentment made Julia sharply aware of her own loneliness.

Mattie opened her eyes again. ‘Talk to me. Tell me the news. Is Lily at Ladyhill?’ Carefully, Julia said, ‘Yes. She’s not coming back. She’s chosen to go and live with Alexander and Clare.’

Mattie’s eyes opened wide now, and she sat up. ‘Bloody hell, Julia. I’m sorry.’

It was hard to talk about it without talking about Alexander. Mattie knew about Clare, of course, but only in the most general way. Now she asked directly, ‘What’s she like?’ Julia could have opened up, then. She might have told Mattie that she felt alone, with no sense of direction or purpose. But Mattie looked so radiant that she couldn’t expose her own desolation. Afterwards she regretted the weakness.

‘She’s my age, or a bit younger. Quite pretty, in an insipid way. A good committee woman. Sensible and responsible, not very clever.’

‘Gawd,’ Mattie said.

‘She’ll be good at looking after Lily’s school uniform, I suppose. And Alexander says that it will be safer for Lily to do her growing up at Ladyhill, anyway. No dope or acid in Ladyhill village, is there?’

‘More’s the pity,’ Mattie drawled. ‘Shh. Don’t let Mitch hear that. So what will you do, Julia?’

‘I thought I might sell the house. It’s too big for me, and it’s worth a shocking amount of money. Oh, don’t worry about Marilyn. I’ll fix her up with another flat, and she’s such a good nanny she could get a job anywhere.’

‘I wasn’t worrying about Marilyn. I don’t worry about Ricky, or Sam and Phil, either. Do you remember that night in the doorway, and the two of us huddled there in the dark worrying about what would happen to them? We should have been saving all our worrying for ourselves. And so should you, Julia.’

Julia smiled, but somehow in the Coppins garden even the memory of the Savoy doorway didn’t draw them close together again.

‘What about your business?’

Julia told her about Suki. Mattie put her head back and laughed. ‘I love the sound of the teapot, and the toilet ashtrays as well. I’ll take six of each.’

‘I think I’m going to take a break from it,’ Julia said abruptly.

Mattie stared. ‘And do what?’

‘I don’t know. Felix asked me not long ago if I felt too old for Garlic & Sapphires. What I do feel is tired. I’m tired of myself, most of all.’

‘That doesn’t sound like you.’

They looked at each other, separated by sun-warmed stones.

‘No,’ Julia said quietly. ‘I think it’s time I wasn’t like myself any more.’

Mattie sat up, wrapping her arms round her knees. ‘Are we still friends?’ she asked.

With the big house looming above her, and the suburban scents of mown grass and roses thickening the air, Julia said, ‘Of course we are,’ and the reassurance denied itself. Mitch came out again, and drew up his deckchair to make a circle. They wouldn’t talk now. Julia knew that. A sense of her own smallness oppressed her.

Mattie and Mitch pressed her to stay to dinner, or at least to have some tea before driving back, but Julia said she must get home. Before she climbed into the car they both kissed her, and then they waved, standing shoulder to shoulder in their gravelled driveway, until she had gone.

Julia had no reason to hurry back to the house by the canal, but it was a relief to be alone again.

Perhaps I
’
m learning
, she thought.
Not to depend, after all. Bloody freedom takes a lot of earning. Or does it only come when you know that you don’t want it?

The exhausted irony seemed too stale to bear thinking about.

The first thing that Julia did the next morning was to put the house by the canal on the market. Within four days she had a buyer who offered a higher price than the agent’s recommendation. The speed disconcerted her briefly, but the momentum pushed her on. Very quickly, hardly even bothering to view it properly, Julia made an offer for a flat in Camden Town. It had two bedrooms; she would need somewhere for Lily’s visits. Julia described it to her on the telephone.

‘It sounds fine,’ Lily said.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes, Mum. I’m fine. Are you?’

‘Oh, yes. Busy, that’s all.’

Arranging to have her business taken care of proved to be no more difficult. Julia took the most senior of her shop managers out to lunch, and suggested to her that she might like to try her hand at managing the entire business for an unspecified period of time.

‘I’d like it very much,’ the woman said promptly. ‘I know I can do it.’

Julia nodded. She had deputised for her successfully in the past.

The manageress was looking curiously at her. ‘But why do you want me to do it?’

‘I’m just tired,’ Julia told her, unable to find a better answer.

After that there was a transition period during which she worked side by side with her deputy, handing Garlic & Sapphires over to her. Julia went through the motions of ordinary life, but she felt as if she was watching herself from some way off. She looked like a stiff little marionette.

Some things pierced her detachment. There was the day when Lily should have come back from Ladyhill. There was another day too, when she happened to pass the school that should have been Lily’s new one. The street outside it was flooded with girls in bottle-green uniforms. Julia sat in her car, watching them as they passed. Twice, she thought she saw Lily amongst them. She had to rub her eyes savagely so that she could see to drive on.

Compared with that, leaving the house by the canal seemed easy. She kept just enough of her furniture to furnish the new flat sparsely, and sold everything else. She almost sold the mutilated kelim, but in the end she rolled it up and took it with her. When she closed the door on the empty house for the last time, she walked away without looking back. She felt lighter as she did it.

She kept the white walls of her new home completely bare. It was easier to look at clean, empty spaces.

By the middle of December, at the height of the Christmas rush, Julia knew that the shops no longer needed her, and that she was only getting in the way of her replacement. At the end of one afternoon she cleared her desk, and said the briefest goodbyes. She walked out of her offices into the icy wind. A Salvation Army silver band was playing carols at the end of the street. Julia stopped to listen, and then emptied her purse into the collecting bag. She walked home to Camden Town, and the feeling of lightness grew stronger. Watching herself, Julia thought how small she looked as she threaded her way through the jostling shoppers.

Julia spent Christmas Day with Felix, at Eaton Square.

He had decorated the high drawing room with dark ivy and branches of blue spruce, frosted with silver, as George had always done. The tree was the same too, hung with silver and sparkling with white light. It made her see again how much Felix missed him.

They were deliberately light-hearted. They exchanged their small, well-chosen presents and drank champagne. They ate Felix’s wonderful Christmas dinner off the gold-rimmed Meissen china, and filled George’s crystal glasses with Chateau Latour. It was a long time since Julia had had so much to drink. She kicked off her shoes and sank back into the sofa cushions, holding out her brandy glass for a refill.

‘Perhaps we should get married, Felix. D’you think we’d make each other happy?’ Julia laughed, but she meant it.

He came to sit beside her, lacing his fingers through hers. Julia rested her head against his shoulder but the movement made her spill her brandy.

‘Whoops.’

‘Would we make each other happy?’ he repeated. ‘I don’t think so. Not in the way that counts.’

She laughed at that, but then he put his hand up to stroke her hair, and the unexpected tenderness made the laughter dissolve into tears.

‘Oh dear. I’m sorry, Felix. I’m not crying because you don’t want to marry me.’

‘I know that.’

He gave her a silk handkerchief, too beautiful for Julia even to contemplate blowing her nose on it. She sniffed firmly instead. ‘I’m going back to Italy,’ she said. ‘For good, I think. I don’t really want to live here any more. And there doesn’t seem to be any point, without Lily.’

‘I’ll miss you very much,’ Felix told her.

They held on to each other tightly. After a few minutes, Julia fell asleep. Much later, when she woke up again, she found that Felix had covered her with a blanket. He used to look after her in just the same way, years ago, when she and Mattie collapsed after their sorties into Soho.